


The Dead Boy

by RurouniHime



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Altered Mental States, Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Angst, Dark, Experimental, Gen, Healing, M/M, Post-War, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-28
Updated: 2011-07-28
Packaged: 2017-10-21 20:46:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/229684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Draco Malfoy visits Harry Potter's grave. (see author's notes)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dead Boy

**Author's Note:**

> I know it sounds like a character death fic. But it's really not.

It's in the furthest row back, seven in. It lies under the sloping shadow of the wrought iron fence on a sunny day, under the hovering gray sky like all the rest of London every other day. White-speckled granite, dull and moss-flecked. The name was worn off long ago, scratched away by sleet and rain and possibly a broken mourner's desperate knife blade. Draco walks to it down the rows of towering, angel-capped monuments; the caretaker has again forgotten to mow the untamed grass out by the fence. Draco settles himself into the damp, haphazard weeds and stays until dark.

He has decided it belongs to Harry Potter, though it is much too ancient for that. He doesn't know where the real one belonging to Harry Potter is.

* * *

Draco finds graveyards peaceful. He comes every day to the one just outside of Islington. It's old and careworn, with an ancient Muggle tottering about looking after it, his thin, white hair matching the calla lilies gracing some of the graves. It's a solemn graveyard, full of old wealth and family secrets. The stones are large and statuesque when there is no actual statue, and walking amongst them is like weaving through a stately crowd of people, perhaps the people buried beneath them, for each soul is there.

Draco likes to read the names through his fingertips. Each stone is different. The granite is rough and textured with tiny, sandpapery pock marks, the marble icy cold and smooth as if it were wet. The simple bronze plaques embedded in the earth are flat, making the air taste different with their metallic shine. Draco runs his hands over the names, letting his fingers linger in each groove, sloping up the soft swing of an S, the sharp cut of a V. The dates ask silently to be touched, to imbue the lengths of the lives they represent into his memory. There are children whose names are too old for their scattering of years - Agnes, Maxwell, Mathilde - and Draco learns each three, four, five-year life as if it were his own life.

He does not ponder too long over what cut each person down, for they sleep peacefully now, and no longer concern themselves with such things.

* * *

The first day, Draco stands in front of the gravestone and lets the cold fill his body. It prickles his fingers, and sends his mind scrabbling for a release it hasn't felt in six years. A sneer climbs onto his face and stretches his lips into their old form. He opens his mouth just once under the first day's wilted sunlight before leaving.

"I've wanted to say one thing for years: you are a _fucker_."

It is spoken with all the rage he can muster, and he likes to think the air hangs heavy over the sunken headstone for days afterward, like a sodden burial shroud.

* * *

The crickets' chirping is heavy in the sun's warmth some days, but Draco likes it best when the clouds travel over, moving swiftly in the wind. The oaks curl their thick, gnarled branches over tilted stones, their shadows distorted by the spill of orange sunlight. Nothing moves in the graveyard, nothing human anyway. Draco lowers himself into the cool depression of earth and lush grass just in front of the stone and examines the thought of hovering just above Harry Potter's remains. Some days he guards them, some days he weighs heavy upon them, depending on his mood and the watery sunlight.

Today he just likes the nearness.

"You can't pretend you didn't know me," Draco reasons amicably, plucking the grass between his crossed legs. He figures he's sitting somewhere over Harry's abdomen. "You knew everyone. When someone knows a person, part of that person knows them in return, so when you meet finally, it's like meeting that part of yourself again. I knew you from the day I could understand spoken words. So, you knew me; when we met, part of you knew me."

He thinks he can pick out the suggestions of a face in the worn front of the gravestone. It took him days of staring but he sees the eyes now, the soft curve of lips when the shadows fall just so. He would have liked to reach out and feel Harry Potter's name, but he'll have to settle for this.

"I had an epiphany once, and that was when you came back from the third task in fourth year. It was dark and suddenly I could see two bodies just lying there and I thought, 'Oh. Potter's dead'. And half the world just sort of fell away all of a sudden. It was so _clear_ , you see. Then there was only one person towering in my vision and he'd only just been brought back to life. Just for a moment it was nothing, the world. And then the next moment I still thought you were dead but it was… complicated again."

Draco looks up at the stone where it sits in absolute autumn silence and waits. The instant passes, and he shrugs and looks down at his hands.

"So I'm trying to find that moment again. You know."

The grass waves lightly under the breeze. Draco sighs and is not sure why.

* * *

Draco talks of the dead game. All the broomsticks rotting in some forgotten shed, or used for sweeping the dust of human existence.

"We can't fly anymore, you see. You've reduced us all to mere human beings again."

Draco would shine that quiet stone up if he could, take his wand and carve Harry Potter's name in pristine elegance across that blank field of granite, and then run his fingers over it as many times as he wished. But his wand cracked in half that last day. Every wand did.

"It was an expensive wand, Potter. It was expensive magic. What could you, or He, for that matter, use it for? But you took it anyway. You're a greedy bastard, you realize. One of you is."

He looks up and sees Harry Potter perched on top of the stone, his eleven-year-old eyes blinking behind enormous glasses, looking at him earnestly. Draco can see right through his scar and he notices just how thin it is, how small. He smiles, and doesn't like Harry looking at him.

* * *

Draco is angry. He brings it with him and it coats the tranquility flowing around his little patch of deceased boyhood.

"I was abused. My father beat me. Everyday. Sometimes he even came at night and touched me."

Draco stares at the blank face of the gravestone, trying to find the etchings that look like eyes and a nose and a half smiling mouth. When he finally finds them, he looks away, blinking.

"No, I can't say that. Well. It's a fucking lie, isn't it? I _should_ be able to say it. No one thinks it's abuse unless they touch you, or hit you. I've turned out like kids who were abused, but no one cares if your parents didn't even yell at you."

Draco sees the stone blurring, but it isn't until his cheeks become damp that he realizes why.

" _You_ hated me. That was something. But you fucking buggered off."

He jerks a handful of grass up and flings it at the headstone. It falls short, giving a whisper-hiss as it slides over the tallest weeds.

"My father didn't do _anything_. I should be able to say it."

It's long dark, the moon hanging in the leafless trees, when Draco departs.

* * *

"Who are you talking to?"

Draco halts mid-sentence and looks up. A man stands there, wearing a long black trench coat, his hands buried deeply in his pockets, hunched against the chill wind. Draco sees the wild, black hair and the green eyes, the glint of glass lenses. It strikes him as absurd and he looks away.

"You don't know him."

The man is silent and Draco goes back to staring at Harry Potter's gravestone. The man shifts and follows his gaze. "What's his name, Malfoy?"

Draco sneers and digs his fingernails viciously into the soil. He shakes his head but he can feel keen eyes on him, shallow and intense.

"His name's Potter."

The man stares at him, mouth half open. He blinks his eyes slowly. "What?"

"Fuck off."

"Malfoy—"

"Fuck _off!_ "

The wind dies a bit and something prickles belatedly at Draco's mind. When he looks up, however, the man is gone and only the other stones remain.

Draco hates it when the ghosts come.

* * *

Draco returns with the daylight and the grave is immaculate under its weeds and solitude. There is no one there save whom he brings with him.

The grave has collapsed over the years, sunken inward. Draco flings himself down over the depressed earth and finds his face tickled by weeds, his clothes slowly soaking in their moisture. He breathes deeply and smells the season's first rain in the dew clinging to each slender stalk of grass, the rich aroma of old, patient soil.

But within an hour the man is approaching again, striding fluidly between the grave markers. His dark hair floats about his face like a living thing and the set of his jaw is hard. He stops just to Draco's left and rocks on his feet.

"Is this some kind of fucking joke, Malfoy?"

Draco stares straight ahead and finds the face in the stone again. He will ignore this one, this intruder. He begins to whisper to the stone, in tones so low even he doesn't hear them. This conversation is not for that man. But he will not leave, and Draco finally sighs and glances at him irritably without speaking.

The man looks at him. "I'm not dead!" His eyes are wide.

Draco fixates on the stone. The man's voice buzzes in his ear like one of the lazy gnats flitting about in the grass, and after a moment, Draco forgets he is there. When evening falls, he gets up and leaves. He doesn't see the man, but he feels his presence anyway, hears foreign words spoken in the dead air of dusk.

* * *

Draco finds he can't speak properly to the grave when the man is there. He wastes an entire day with the man's eyes boring into his back, hands clenching in the pockets of his black trench - Draco can't see his fingers curling, but he can tell. He opens his mouth again and again. It angers him that he should speak these things to this man just because he has the same dark hair, just because his eyes are that shade of green - they are not the same, they are too old - just because he speaks Draco's name as the same curse the Boy Who Lived used it for.

The man is usually there, but his voice has quieted, and Draco is thankful. He doesn't like the questions, the ones about why, and how, and wouldn't you rather go somewhere else, coffee perhaps? Sometimes the voice cracks like ancient marble. Sometimes the man doesn't come, and then the little plot is quiet except for Draco's own voice.

Draco kneels over the grave, stares hard at the granite, and remembers worried green eyes and questions about coffee. But that is neither here nor there. Draco takes a breath.

"I wanted a name. One that was mine. I wanted people to know it. No one who knew my name back then is alive anymore. They're all dead, or. Different. It's the same thing."

* * *

The only bells Draco really hears are the ones at noon. Perhaps because there are so many of them, marching, like a funeral dirge, but when Draco looks up, he sees no procession, only a pacing figure who has heard all of the words that were not meant for him.

The man kneels down in front of him, blocking his view of the gravestone. Draco tries to look around him but the man grabs his shoulders and shakes him hard.

"Damn fucking hell, Malfoy, _talk to the living!_ "

The words ring and ring, bell tones wavering against those of the church steeple. Suddenly Draco is furious. Furious at the voice, furious at the interruption. Furious at the presence of the living in this place. He whirls on the man.

"It's his fault! It's _all_ his fault! He's the reason I'm like this. If he had just died when he was supposed to, I would have known what I was meant to do. But he lived and he made it all complicated! If he'd just died _then_ , he could have changed things, but now, dying _now_ , nothing's different! Now he's just a dead boy!"

The man's eyes are wide and glimmering. He gapes at Draco but Draco has already turned back to the grave of the Boy Who Lived.

* * *

The next day the man squats down beside him and just looks at him for a long moment before speaking.

"Are you mourning?" he asks softly.

Draco snorts. "For what? All of it?"

The man is quiet and Draco can hear his breaths leaving his body. Exhale. Inhale. Surprising, but it fits with the gentle wave of the flowers, the rush of wind through the oak tree overhead. The man rises to his feet, and Draco looks up at him, suddenly sorrowful.

"You know, you look just like him," he says.

The man stares at him, trying to speak, but his jaw just works a bit and then stills. The man turns away, and his face is helpless as he leaves.

Draco turns his attention back to the grave, but finds he has nothing to say. The words have vanished like the fog that rolls in during the dawn, trailing about his shoes until the sun burns it away. He goes to one of the rose bushes lining the fence, picks a few flowers, and leaves them at the grave, because that is what people do in graveyards. But when he stands up to go, he feels it is a trite gesture.

* * *

The man comes day after day, but he doesn't speak anymore. Draco sits and watches the stone, and tries to find things to say to the Boy Who Lived, but everything has dried up and blown away, like old bones and ash. The graveyard seems colder.

"I wish you would talk to me."

The man's voice breaks the silence and Draco breathes again, not realizing he hadn't been. Someone should be speaking when he is not, it's only right, because the silence is no longer calm. It's just empty. Draco wishes the man would speak again and is not sure why.

The man sighs. His voice is faint when he continues. "I didn't know," he says. "I didn't. You had everything, you weren't a part of my world. At least I didn't think so."

Silence, the waiting sort. Draco doesn't want to be waiting, but he is, on the tip of some knife point. Waiting.

"If I'd known… I guess we all get a little caught up in our own lives." The man falters, starts again, "Draco—" then his voice falls away into that realm of giving up.

It's a familiar voice, and yet it is strange. The tones are suddenly more recognizable, but that name in those tones is not. That name does not belong there, yet it settles like a delicate moth, and it is like breaking through a pane of fogged glass and emerging into breathable air.

He's never heard that name and thought, _Me._

Draco's eyes open and he suddenly sees beyond the stone, the wrought iron fence and roses, to the red double-decker buses going by, the lilac-blue awning of the small, lopsided café, and the people sitting there taking the air. He hears car exhaust and chattering and the rattle of a jackhammer and the familiarity of the voice.

When he looks over, _Harry_ is crouched there, not young, not dead, but closer to death, wiser to its wiles than he was at seventeen. His green eyes are full of sunlight.

Draco blinks. "Harry?"

Harry nods, and his black hair flips a bit and settles. He watches Draco intently. There is a desperation held behind those parted lips.

Draco sighs.

"I think I'm ready for some coffee now."

Harry smiles and lets out a soft breath. The graveyard is peaceful again.

~fin~


End file.
